Jillian C. York

Jillian C. York

Director for International Freedom of Expression

Jillian C. York is EFF's Director for International Freedom of Expression and is based in Berlin, Germany. Her work examines state and corporate censorship and its impact on culture and human rights. At EFF, she currently works on several projects, including Surveillance Self-Defense and Onlinecensorship.org. Jillian's writing has been featured in Motherboard, the Guardian, Quartz, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, among others. She is also a regular speaker at global events.

Prior to joining EFF, Jillian worked at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where she researched Internet censorship. In a previous life, she lived in Morocco and worked as an English teacher and travel writer.

Jillian holds a BA in Sociology from Binghamton University, where—like a surprisingly large number of individuals in her field—she also studied theatre. She alternately resides in the Internet or on an airplane and can often be found blogging or tweeting, as @jilliancyork.

Deeplinks Posts by Jillian C.

Last week, EFF was dismayed to learn that Ethiopian journalist and blogger Eskinder Nega had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison under a sweeping and overbroad Anti-Terrorism Proclamation. More than one hundred other Ethiopians, including nine journalists, have been sentenced under the vague law. In December 2011...

Bloggers Under Fire in the Gulf
In Bahrain and Oman, netizens are coming under fire once again. In Bahrain--where opposition activists have frequently been detained and maligned on social networks--Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, a fellow member of IFEX, wassentenced on July 10...

EFF is proud to announce that we've joined the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) as a 2012 interim member. IFEX is a network of more than 90 independent organizations in more than 50 countries worldwide that works to expose free expression violations around the world.
By joining IFEX...

Crossposted from Techpresident
We are living in an era where transparency — be it from government, corporations, or individuals — has come to be expected. As such, social media platforms have come under scrutiny in recent years for their policies around content moderation, but perhaps none have received as...

For quite some time, EFF has campaigned for changes to the export controls that prevent important communications technologies from reaching activists and dissidents. These export controls—enacted by the Departments of Treasury and Commerce and detailed here—often hurt the very individuals they’re meant to help, by restricting access for citizens...

Sudan may not have "pulled a Mubarak" and shut off the Internet, but that hasn't stopped the government's attempts to silence vocal citizens online. Four days after we first reported his arrest, Usamah Mohammed Ali (better known as @simsimt) remains in detention, his whereabouts unknown, while ...

As we’ve acknowledged before, our lives are increasingly contained on our digital devices, which makes travel—and the decisions we make about what to carry with us—increasingly complicated.
A recent case in which two young travelers to Israel were requested not simply to provide their laptops for arbitrary searches...

The decision faced by dictators to shut off the Internet (and risk economic loss) or keep their citizens online (and risk an Internet-assisted revolt) has been referred to by some as the "dictator's dilemma." In the case of Sudan, where anti-austerity protests have been raging for five days and...

“No iPad for you!” The sentiment may have evoked the fictional SoupNazi, but the salesperson was completely serious. After hearing 19-year-old Sahar Sabet speaking Persian with her uncle, an Apple store employee refusedtosellSabetan...